Pebble, the OG Smartwatch That May Never Die, Updated To Work With Pixel 7

Nearly six years after the Pebble smartwatch was purchased by Fitbit and discontinued, a new Pebble app for Android has been released by the Rebble Alliance, a group that has kept Pebble viable for its users since Fitbit shut down Pebble’s servers in mid-2018,” writes Ars Technica’s Kevin Purdy. “Pebble version 4.4.3 makes the app 64-bit so it can work on the mostly 64-bit Pixel 7 and similar Android phones into the future. It also restores a caller ID function that was hampered on recent Android versions.” From the report: Most notably, the app is “signed using the official Pebble keys,” with Google Fit integration maintained, but isn’t available through Google’s Play Store. Google acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion, making it the steward of Pebble’s remaining IP and software pieces. Katharine Berry, a key Rebble coder and leader, works on Wear OS at Google and was one of the first to tweet news of the new update, “four years after 4.4.2.” That was the last Play Store update to the Pebble app from Pebble developers, one that freed up many of the app’s functions to be replaced by independent servers.

That’s exactly where Rebble picked up, providing web services to Pebble watches, including (for paying subscribers) voice dictation. But those services still relied on the core Pebble app to connect the watch and smartphone. If Android did make the leap to a 64-bit-only OS, it could have left Pebble/Rebble users in the lurch. Berry’s post on r/pebble offers “thanks to Google for providing us with one last update!” This is, to be sure, not the typical outcome of products that have been acquired by Google, even if second-hand.

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Twitter Will Allow Users To Buy and Sell NFTs Through Tweets

Social media platform Twitter today announced that it will let users buy, sell, and display NFTs directly through tweets in partnership with four marketplaces. Decrypt reports: The integration, called NFT Tweet Tiles, displays the artwork of an NFT in a dedicated panel within a tweet, and includes a button to let users click through to a marketplace listing. The integration — which is still in testing — currently works with marketplaces from four specific partners: Solana-centric marketplace Magic Eden, multi-platform NFT marketplace protocol Rarible, Flow blockchain creator Dapper Labs, and sports-centric platform Jump.trade. Collectively, those marketplaces span several blockchain networks, including Ethereum, Solana, Flow, Polygon, Tezos, and Immutable X.

A Twitter representative confirmed to Decrypt that the feature is blockchain-agnostic, so all networks are supported so long as the links are from a partnered marketplace. The representative added that the “feature is currently being tested with select Twitter users across iOS and web,” and that those users will see the NFT Tweet Tile integration if they’re in the test group. A Twitter Blue premium subscription is not required to use the feature.

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Twitter Is Now an Elon Musk Company

Elon Musk has “added [Twitter] to his business empire after months of legal skirmishes,” writes The Verge’s Elizabeth Lopatto, citing reports from CNBC, The Washington Post and Insider. From the report: Musk’s first move on Thursday was to oust Parag Agrawal, who was Twitter’s last CEO as a public company. Chief financial officer Ned Segal and Vijaya Gadde, the company’s policy chief whom Musk had publicly criticized have also reportedly left the building. Sean Edgett, the general counsel, is also gone, The New York Times reports, adding that at least one of these executives was walked out by security. Chief customer officer Sarah Personette was also fired, Insider reports. The execs received handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal got $38.7 million, Segal got $25.4 million, Gadde got $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, got $11.2 million

Questions still remain about what Musk plans to do with Twitter now that he owns it, though he’s made a number of public comments. The Washington Post reported that Musk planned to cull 75 percent of Twitter’s employees, citing estimates given to prospective Twitter investors. Musk told Twitter staffers that the 75 percent figure was inaccurate, Bloomberg reported. In Musk’s text messages, provided during discovery to Twitter’s lawyers, he and entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, a friend of his, discussed cutting staff by requiring a return to office. “Day zero,” Calacanis texted Musk. “Sharpen your blades boys.” Requiring Twitter employees to return to offices would mean 20 percent of the staff would leave voluntarily, Calacanis wrote. Also, Calacanis told Musk, “Twitter CEO is my dream job.”

Twitter also faces challenges to its free speech stance in court, as the Supreme Court agreed to take up two cases that will determine its liability for illegal content. Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has suggested he’ll change the way Twitter’s moderation works, potentially relaxing the kinds of policies that saw former President Donald Trump permanently banned from the platform. Although Musk has said that his Twitter acquisition is “not a way to make money,” he’s reportedly raised ideas for cost cutting and increasing revenue. Governments and corporations could be charged a “slight cost” to use Twitter, and there could be job cuts on the table to improve the company’s bottom line. Some of Twitter’s current employees have criticized Musk’s plans for the platform as “incoherent” and lacking in detail. More broadly, Musk has talked about using Twitter to create “X, the everything app.” This is a reference to China’s WeChat app, which started life as a messaging platform, but has since grown to encompass multiple businesses, from shopping to payments to gaming. “You basically live on WeChat in China,” Musk told Twitter employees in June. “If we can recreate that with Twitter, we’ll be a great success.”

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Google Introduces Cloud-Based Blockchain Node Service For Ethereum

Tech giant Google said Thursday it will be launching a cloud-based node engine for Ethereum projects. CoinDesk reports: The company said its Google Cloud Blockchain Node Engine will be a “fully managed node-hosting service that can minimize the need for node operations,” meaning that Google will be responsible for monitoring node activity and restarting them during outages. A node is a type of computer that runs a blockchain’s software to validate and store the history of transactions on a blockchain’s network. At the time of launch, Google will be supporting only Ethereum nodes. Google’s announcement signifies the growing attention that technology giants are giving toward blockchain, crypto and Web3 projects. “Blockchain is changing the way the world stores and moves its information,” Google said in its announcement.

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First Bitcoin ETF Loses Record Amount In Its Initial Year

One year after its record-breaking launch, the world’s first exchange traded fund tracking the price of bitcoin has lost more of investors’ dollars than any other ETF debut. The Financial Times reports: Asset manager ProShares launched its Bitcoin Strategy fund in October 2021, and it immediately became the most successful new ETF in history, amassing more than $1bn in its first week of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Bitcoin enthusiasts proclaimed the launch as the moment when crypto joined the world’s biggest equities market and became enmeshed in mainstream investment strategies for retail and institutional buyers alike. But one year into its existence, the fund has lost money on an unprecedented scale, according to data from Morningstar Direct for the Financial Times.

Its 70 percent share price drop also makes this the sixth-worst performing debut ETF of its kind of all time, in a test for investors during what has become known as the “crypto winter.” The ETF, known as BITO, has attracted inflows consistently through its life, with only light withdrawals. But even with net inflows of $1.8 billion in its debut year, its assets now stand at $624 million. Taking together the timing of inflows and the 70 per cent drop in the fund’s equity price, Morningstar calculates that BITO has lost $1.2 billion of investors’ money, making this by far the biggest debut loser. Buyers “remained extremely loyal to the long-term thesis for bitcoin,” said Todd Rosenbluth, head of research at consultancy VettaFi.

“The fund has not seen the outflows one would expect given its performance. The pendulum has swung away from certain investment theses this year. Historically it can swing back in favor, but the challenge is whether the asset manager has the confidence to keep the product afloat.”

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Meta’s Profit Slides by More Than 50 Percent as Challenges Mount

The social networking company, which is trying to shift into the so-called metaverse, posted falling sales and said it was “making significant changes” to operate more efficiently. The New York Times reports: This year, Meta’s earnings have been hit hard by its spending on the metaverse and its slowing growth in social networking and digital advertising. In July, the Silicon Valley company posted its first sales decline as a public company. Its stock has plunged more than 60 percent this year. On Wednesday, Meta continued that trajectory and indicated that the decline would not end anytime soon. It said it would be “making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently,” including by shrinking some teams and by hiring only in its areas of highest priority.

The company reported a 4 percent drop in revenue for its third quarter — to $27.7 billion, down from $29 billion a year earlier. Net income was $4.4 billion, down 52 percent from a year earlier. Spending soared by 19 percent from a year earlier. The company’s metaverse investments remained troubled. Meta said its Reality Labs division, which is responsible for the virtual reality and augmented reality efforts that are central to the metaverse, had lost $3.7 billion compared with $2.6 billion a year earlier. It said operating losses for the division would grow “significantly” next year. For the current quarter, Meta forecast revenue of between $30 billion and $32.5 billion, which would be down from a year ago. The company’s shares fell more than 11 percent in after-hours trading. In a statement, Mr. Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and chief executive, acknowledged “near-term challenges on revenue.” But he added that “the fundamentals are there for a return to stronger revenue growth” and that he was “approaching 2023 with a focus on prioritization and efficiency.”

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Swarming Bees May Potentially Change the Weather

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Swarming bees produce so much electricity that they may affect local weather, new research suggests. The finding, which researchers made by measuring the electrical fields around honeybee (apis mellifera) hives, reveals that bees can produce as much atmospheric electricity as a thunderstorm. This can play an important role in steering dust to shape unpredictable weather patterns; and their impact may even need to be included in future climate models.

Insects’ tiny bodies can pick up positive charge while they forage — either from the friction of air molecules against their rapidly beating wings (honeybees can flap their wings more than 230 times a second) or from landing onto electrically charged surfaces. But the effects of these tiny charges were previously assumed to be on a small scale. Now, a new study, published Oct. 24 in the journal iScience, shows that insects can generate a shocking amount of electricity.

To test whether honeybees produce sizable changes in the electric field of our atmosphere, the researchers placed an electric field monitor and a camera near the site of several honeybee colonies. In the 3 minutes that the insects flooded into the air, the researchers found that the potential gradient above the hives increased to 100 volts per meter. In other swarming events, the scientists measured the effect as high as 1,000 volts per meter, making the charge density of a large honeybee swarm roughly six times greater than electrified dust storms and eight times greater than a stormcloud. The scientists also found that denser insect clouds meant bigger electrical fields — an observation that enabled them to model other swarming insects such as locusts and butterflies.

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Nvidia RTX 4090’s Power Draw May Be Too Much For Its Power Connector To Handle

An anonymous reader shares a report: Nvidia’s $1,599 GeForce RTX 4090 is an incredibly powerful graphics card, but its performance comes at the cost of high power draw. Like a few of the RTX 3000-series cards, Nvidia uses a new kind of 16-pin 12VHPWR power connector to supply all that power to the card — you can plug up to four 8-pin GPU power cables into the 12VHPWR adapter, which then plugs into the connector on the GPU, saving some board space.

But at least two RT 4090 users are now reporting that their 12VHPWR connectors have overheated and melted during use. These complaints are sourced from Reddit (via Tom’s Hardware), so take them with a grain of salt — we don’t know the exact configuration of either user’s PC setup. The specific model of graphics card (a Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC for one user, an Asus RTX 4090 TUF Gaming OC Edition for the other), the power supply, and any number of other factors could have contributed to the connectors overheating.

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FAA Warns of Aviation Safety Risks Without US Mandate On 5G Limits

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) wants the U.S. telecommunications regulatory agency to ensure a delay in some 5G C-Band transmissions from smaller operators. Reuters reports: Acting FAA Administrator Billy Nolen said the agency wants the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to mandate voluntary mitigations that AT&T and Verizon agreed to earlier this year mandated for 19 smaller telecoms and other spectrum holders. In a previously unreported letter dated Friday, Nolen cited industry data established “aviation safety would be compromised if the U.S. government does not codify certain additional operating limits in the 5G C-Band environment.”

Concerns that the 5G service could interfere with airplane altimeters, which give data on a plane’s height above the ground and are crucial for bad-weather landing, led to disruptions at some U.S. airports earlier this year. Nolen’s letter warns that without the FCC mandating the mitigations “the FAA would be forced to take immediate steps to ensure the safety of the traveling public, raising the likelihood of flight disruptions across the United States.”

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Rishi Sunak Is the First Crypto Enthusiast To Serve In UK’s Top Office

Gizmodo points out that the United Kingdom’s next prime minister, Rishi Sunak, “is a certified Crypto Bro who once requested that the Royal Mint issue an NFT.” From the report: During his tenure as finance minister under former PM Boris Johnson, Sunak was in charge of advancing a number of crypto-related initiatives that sought to normalize digital currencies and integrate them into the British economy. By all accounts, he is the first crypto enthusiast to serve in the UK’s top office. He’s also the first person of color and the youngest PM — 42 years old — that Britain’s had in 200 years. To be fair, Sunak’s efforts at crypto promotion have at least trended towards regulation and taxation as opposed to total laissez faire deregulated madness — though those efforts could, ultimately, simply normalize a phenomenon that critics say is redundant at best and a privacy hazard at worst. In April, Sunak announced a series of programs to turn the UK into what he called a “global cryptoasset technology hub.” Among the initiatives announced at the time was a plan to integrate stablecoins into the national payment system, thus “paving their way for use in the UK as a recognized form of payment.” Considered to be the least volatile form of cryptocurrency, stablecoins have seen more interest by governments than other forms of crypto — though projects like Terra and Tether have shown the potential danger in putting too much faith in the assets’ stability.

Sunak’s plans also suggested creating additional regulations that would’ve helped further incorporate crypto into the UK’s economic and legal framework, thus spurring greater investment in the space. “The measures we’ve outlined today will help to ensure firms can invest, innovate and scale up in this country,” Sunak wrote in a press release published at the time. Another ambitious initiative pushed by Sunak was the Financial Services and Markets Bill, a piece of legislation that would give local governments in Britain broad discretion to regulate cryptocurrencies, thus further assimilating them into the nation’s economy. The bill, which has not yet passed, is currently being looked at by Parliament.

At the same time, Sunak also recently backed a study to look at the potential benefits of creating a central bank digital currency (CBDC), or “Britcoin” as he dubbed it. Proponents of CBDCs argue that they could have benefits for spenders, making payments “faster, cheaper, and more secure,” as one op-ed puts it. However, critics argue that they are unnecessary and could ultimately spell huge privacy troubles, given the trackable nature of crypto and digital currencies. Despite his crypto track record, analysts have suggested that is is unlikely Sunak will have time to focus much on any web3-related initiatives in the near term. Given Britain’s current economic dumpster fire, any work on “Britcoin” might have to take a backseat.

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